


The Alisa Arias

by EysabellePerfume



Category: Cowboy Bebop (Anime)
Genre: Angst, Doomed Relationship, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-31
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-27 15:49:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20048596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EysabellePerfume/pseuds/EysabellePerfume
Summary: "So you wander with a group of weirdoes now, do you? Stray cats you’ve taken in, no doubt, to look after and fret over and boss around. I hope they give you what you need. I hope they need what you have to give them."





	The Alisa Arias

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this one years ago ... oh, years and years ago. Lots of years ago.

“That's a story from long ago... I've... forgotten it.”  
\- Alisa, “Ganymede Elegy”

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”  
\- Goethe

Dear Jet,

It’s late, but I doubt I’ll be able to sleep tonight. After you left us, I followed Rhint to the police station and phoned a lawyer I know, one of my customers, who agreed to take the case pro bono. She came down and talked with us. She thinks Rhint’s got a strong case. “It’s a good thing you didn’t try to run,” she said, in all innocence. And Rhint looked at me, and I at him, and he said, “It’s a good thing we didn’t run very far.”

I suppose I should thank you for stopping us. When I think of how our lives might have been, Rhint’s and mine, as fugitives, I feel physically ill. I go cold all over, and I wonder just what the hell I was thinking. 

Please understand, Jet. The gratitude is there, but it’s tangled with so many other emotions that I’m having a hard time extricating it, pure and unbroken, and without residual anger, or fear, or resentment. Or, oddly enough, without regret. 

Without affection.

#

Marvis after midnight used to be a lively place -- not the shabby ghost town I walked through tonight. The stillness made me uneasy in my skin. Twitchy. Only my footsteps, and the skitter of a half-crumpled newspaper blowing across the street, broke the silence. For one panicked moment I thought I’d lost the sea -- that it, too, had deserted Marvis. I stood still and listened, and gradually its sounds came back to me through the pounding in my ears ... the waves lapping against the piers, the fishing boats creaking and muttering in their sleep. My heartbeat slowed to normal, and I finished my journey, that much more exhausted than before, back to Le Fin.

When I unlocked the door, I laughed at myself that I’d even taken the time to lock it in the first place. Being on the lam, as it were. Had I been locking something out, or locking something in?

Your glass was still on the bar, sitting in a ring of condensation. Nothing was left of your drink but half an inch of tepid water and the scent of bourbon. Nothing was left of you, but this. I sat on the bar stool where you’d sat, and tipped the water into my mouth. I probably just imagined the taste of your lips on the rim of the glass.

# 

I lied to you tonight. 

I remember.

#

When I came in from the back room this evening and you turned to me, your face so eager, so unguardedly happy, it electrified me. I felt as if I were seeing the boy you’d been at twenty-two, when we first met. You were so much like a half-grown Labrador retriever back then, all huge awkward feet and excitement, so anxious to please, and so distraught that your attempts might come to nothing.

And me -- for just a moment, I was the lanky, leggy, Italian girl tending bar for a living just to make her intellectual family mad. 

Juney noticed you first. You remember Juney, don’t you? Red braids down to her ass and that godawful, high-pitched laugh? I’ve heard she’s an environmental engineer on Charon now. Something to do with ammonia ice. Well, anyway. She noticed the way you watched me, that first night you showed up at Parker’s -- the way you kept getting up to come to the bar, and kept changing your mind and sitting back down again. She pegged you for a Virgo with a Taurus ascendant, on account of the way your hair was already beginning to recede (“Poor sap!”) in a horn-shaped pattern.

I didn’t care about that. You looked awfully good to me. Broad-shouldered, handsome, with those wicked razored sideburns. I liked it that you really paid attention to the band -- that music meant something to you and wasn’t just aural wallpaper. (It was the Filho de Santo Jazz Quartet that week. Their drummer had a thing for Jager floats, but the other boys drank nothing but caipirinhas.) I liked it that you seemed shy. I liked all the tedious predictable jerky offenses you utterly failed to commit against me.

You were back the next night, fidgety, chain-smoking, getting all flustered every time I met your gaze. You still wouldn’t come to the bar, to me; and we were too busy for me to get away. I finally sent Juney on a fact-finding mission, right before last call. When she came back and said you were a cop, I laughed outright. I didn’t believe her. I said the cut of your suit was too good. 

“Trust me. That is 100% Grade A ISSP you’re looking at. Better watch your step. He asked if you had boyfriend.” Those were her exact words. Funny, what a person remembers. 

What else do I remember? That I caught your eye and winked, and then had to clap my hand over my mouth to hold in my laughter when you upset your drink into your ashtray. 

I remember Juney handed me a fresh bourbon, a clean ashtray, a damp rag, and pushed me out from behind the bar.

I was wearing a little black dress and a pair of glittery silver fishnets that night. Legs up to there ... that’s what you always said. I could all but feel your gaze traveling every inch of them.

You nearly knocked over the table, standing up. I was gratified to see you had a few inches on me. I was tired of dating shorter men. And yes, by that time, I was almost certain I was going to date you. I’d never dated a cop before. It seemed an exotic prospect ... particularly since the cop in question was so clearly and adorably unsure of his own considerable powers of attraction.

What did I say to you? Some palaver about being psychic, and coming over to read your fortune in the beer-drowned cigarette butts. We both sat down. I took a sip of your drink before I gave it to you, and then I bent, quite studiously, over the mess in the ashtray. And you just sat there, stiff as a nail and nervous as hell, staring at me like you didn’t know whether to take me at face value or not. (You still haven’t figured out teasing, have you? The way you reacted tonight when I said I had three children ... I smile to remember it.)

“I see ... so that’s how it is. It’s really terribly clear.”

“What do you see?” Your voice, deep as it was, still managed to crack.

I remember I looked you in the eye and said, “Before I tell you, you must promise me one thing: whatever happens, you won’t ask me if it’s worth the climb.”

I thought you’d choke on your drink. Even in the bar light, I could see the color rushing to your face. 

I tapped my forefinger against my right temple. “Or is that strictly a short-man pickup line?”

“I wouldn’t know,” you said. Poor boy.

“Do I have your promise?”

You nodded. I could tell you still weren’t sure whether or not I was putting you on.

“Good. Because I see you walking me home tonight, and I’d like it to be a pleasant journey for both of us.” I held out my hand. “I’m Alisa Franceschelli.”

You took my hand in yours. I remember marveling at how big it was, and how small mine looked in it. 

“Jet Black.”

# 

Of course, once we got to my place, I invited you in.

We sat on my junk store couch for hours, just talking about everything. Books. Music. Work. I’d moved to the city to get away from my ivory-tower family, but I couldn’t escape my upbringing. If you’d been a dolt, that would have been the end of it, then and there. But it was clear, from your conversation, that you were both intelligent and educated, and I knew I’d be able to respect you for your mind.

At six, I made a pot of coffee. My apartment was smoky, hot, unfamiliar and somehow smaller with you in it. You drank a cup of coffee with me and then you got up to leave.

At the door you hesitated, diffident again.

“Something on your mind?” I asked you.

You cleared your throat and clumsily loosened your tie. “Yeah.”

“Tell me.”

“I think -- Well, I think I’d probably better walk you home every night from now on. This isn’t a safe neighborhood at night, and, well. That’s all.”

“I see. You’re volunteering to be my personal bodyguard?”

“That’s right.”

“There’s only one problem.”

“What’s that?”

I moved next to you, just a hair short of too close, and said, “Who’s going to protect you against me?” 

It sounded as if you were swallowing an apple whole. And then you started stammering, and you pushed that fedora back on your head to wipe your brow, and I stood on my toes and kissed your forehead. Then the bridge of your nose. Then your upper lip. Your lower lip. By that time, you’d caught on and began kissing me back.

And I remember thinking with regret, if only I’d been a few inches taller, we would have fit together so perfectly, hip to hip.

#

I’ve put a pot of coffee on. Not much chance of my sleeping tonight. The percolator makes such comforting, domestic sounds. I love the gurgle and hiss, soft, irregular. Seven years, and it still makes me think of making breakfast for you.

Thinking back, it seems as if we became a couple, moved in together, almost by accident.

What do I remember about those early days? Our first apartment, with the blue and white hex tiles on the bathroom floor, and the maple tree outside the bedroom window, where a climbing rose had grown wild. In summer, we left the windows open and the fragrance filled our bedroom. I remember the year a robin built her nest in the tree. We took our morning coffee in the bedroom then, so we could watch her progress. You tried to hide it, but you had tears in your eyes when that first hatchling opened its beak in hunger.

I loved you for things like that. 

I remember the time I decided to go blonde, and, under protest, you put on gloves and helped me with the stinking messes of bleach and toner. You got a glob of it on your beard. We didn’t notice until it was too late. It bleached that spot out to a dreadful orange. You broke down and shaved your beard to get rid of it, and I cried, and you said that was what I got for trying to improve on nature.

Of course, you were right. After a week, I dyed my hair black again.

I remember you teaching me how to buy fish down at the public market -- what to look for, what to smell for. I remember reading a chapter of Alice in Wonderland to you every night after dinner, until we’d finished the book. I remember slow dancing with you in the living room, when the only light on was that stupid orange glowing rocket-ship lamp you bought at a second-hand store.

I’ll bet you’ve still got that damn lamp, don’t you?

I remember going out to see different jazz bands, sometimes by ourselves, more frequently with Fad and his girlfriend-of-the-month. (Every once in a while, I’ll see one of those women, in a grocery store or waiting for the bus, and we’ll pretend not to recognize each other.)

Do you remember the woman selling flowers underneath the monorail on Chateau Street? We used to fill the house with Japanese iris we bought from her. Vases and vases of them, purple as ink.

When I was in the throes of PMS, you’d buy me boxes of chocolates and whistle missile sounds as you lobbed them through the bedroom door. And when I was on my period, you’d cook me a steak so rare it was practically still mooing. “You need your iron.”

#

Poor Jet. What I really needed was my steel.

#

You were so innocent in those days. I think you might laugh at that word. But it’s true. You were innocent in love and innocent in the workings of the world. And day after day, month after month, you’d come home with a little more of that innocence peeled away. At first you talked about it. Then you stopped. And the more you saw, the more you tried to protect me. Suddenly the world was a dangerous place, and life a tenuous thing, easily and carelessly crushed. You couldn’t protect everybody, so you protected me, instead. The need became almost frantic.

You decided we should move to the suburbs.

Then you decided I didn’t need to work any more.

I went along with it. Back then, I hoped it might ease your mind, and erase the deep worry lines you brought home with you every night. Now I wish I’d stood firm and made us battle it through together. Giving in set a bad precedent

Domesticity never sat well with me. You were so much better at it, anyway. My housekeeping was desultory, my cooking indifferent. I spent my days trying to fill up the time reading how-to articles online. Seven years slipped by so fast that I hardly noticed. There were times I’d catch myself on the verge of writing 2057 on the rent checks, and wonder what had happened to me, and to my life.

But when you held me at night, I’d forget everything else.

#

Then came the night Fad called.

When I saw you like that in the hospital, I wanted to hurt somebody. Not with a gun but with my fists and my feet and my teeth. I wanted to kill the person who’d done you that way. I was almost wild with rage. Fad had to drag me out of the hospital and into the parking garage. He poured whiskey into me and spent hours talking me down. He said I had to take all my anger and turn it into strength. He said I had to be strong for you.

And suddenly, through the haze of whiskey and rage, I felt as if my life had finally found its purpose.

#

Do you have any idea how bitter it was for me to write that one pathetic little sentence?

#

No need to work, you told me. We’d get by on the insurance money for now. No need for me to do anything to take up the slack. No need for me at all.

You had your ego. But Jet, so did I. Every time you pushed me away, all I could hear was “You’re not good enough.”

Everybody needs to be needed. Even me. To insist on having all the strength, really, is such bad manners. You understood diplomacy. You had to, to make the connections you made during your career. But diplomacy ended at home.

Now all I can see in my mind’s eye is you in our little suburban house, slouched on the couch, drinking and smoking and listening to Charlie Parker in the dark.

Night after night after night.

And then when you came to bed, I would turn toward you, and you would smoothly turn your back to me. You did everything in your power to make sure your metal arm, your metal fingers, never touched me.

During that time, you reminded me of nothing so much as a fly floundering on the surface of a bowl of water, struggling not to drown.

#

And later, you worked day and night fixing that wreck of a fishing vessel you’d bought at auction. I knew that once you finished it, you were going to leave Ganymede and never come back. It was a mouthful of poison you held, until you could finally spit it out. 

I wanted to help you. Oh, Jet, more than you can know, I wanted for there to be something we could work on together.

But you didn’t want that. You wanted to do it on your own, everything, always, on your own, to prove to the world that you were as much a man as before. But Jet, there are different ways of being a man in this world. And there’s a big difference between being a man, and being a superman.

#

I couldn’t go on like that.

I tried to tell you. As God is my witness, I tried. You wouldn’t listen. You never heard. Maybe I should have shouted, just to get your attention. Well, you know I’m not the shouting type. In the end, I said the only thing you paid attention to. I said good-bye.

And then this evening you told me how you had waited for me to come back, and I realized you hadn’t even heard that.

#

Don’t forget your umbrella. Don’t forget your hat. Don’t forget your raincoat. You thought of colds. I thought of the feel of rain on my skin and in my hair.

Poor Jet. What a conniption you would have had, had you seen what I was wearing when I left. A little skirt that showed my legs-up-to-there, a little bum-freezer jacket. If I could have shed even those things, that tied me to you and to our life together, I would have gone out naked.

Naked as the day I was born.

As I understand it, I cried that day, too.

#

Water under the bridge. Or so I thought. I never realized how angry I still was, until you came for Rhint. I wanted to shoot you. I really did. But you made my hands shake. How could you still have the power to make me small, and defensive, and ashamed, without even knowing you’re doing it? Seven years I’ve had, to learn and grow and risk. Seven years turned to nothing, crushed to dust in your broad hand.

I didn’t want to shoot to kill. I just wanted to get your goddamn attention. Pay attention for a change. I could shoot and scream and batter myself against you, and you still wouldn’t hear me, would you?

I told you everything, and still you didn’t hear me. I knew it when you had Rhint by the neck and said to him --

said to him --

“Be strong ... protect her.”

#

When you talked to me in La Fin tonight, I kept my back to you, a reverse of how we’d been those last few months, in bed. I was afraid to face you. I was afraid I might put my arms around you and kiss you.

Even after seven years.

Oh, hell. I’ve paid my money and taken my choice, and all in all, I don’t think I chose badly. Rhint ... we’re the same height. Nearly the same weight. We fit well, he and I, and not just at the hip.

I won’t write much about Rhint. I saw the contempt in your face. It’s uncalled for, Jet. Rhint is a good man. Maybe he doesn’t lob boxes of chocolates like hand-grenades. Maybe he can’t cook worth a damn. But he sings to me at night, softly, in that slurred Ganymede patois. He sits me between his knees and runs his fingers through my hair to help me relax. He loves me. He needs me. And he doesn’t mind admitting it.

We all have our strengths and our virtues. We all have our weaknesses. Even you. The Rhint you saw tonight was a man who had taken another human’s life and hadn’t been able to process it yet. Maybe you don’t remember that night you came home, the first time you'd shot a man. I do. I remember you locking yourself in the bathroom, kneeling on the blue and white hex tiles. I couldn’t tell where the dry heaves left off and the sobs began.

#

Tonight, I made a mistake when I told Rhint we’d run; we’d go away and remake ourselves. But that’s my pattern, isn’t it? My surroundings close around me, until I can’t move or breathe, and I have to break away. From my family. From you. Maybe that’s a feeling you have come to understand.

Or maybe not. Maybe you want to tend everything the way you tended those horrid bonsai you took up while you were recovering, clipping and restraining their range of growth to keep them small and manageable.

Now Rhint’s in jail, and you’re God knows where, and I’m here again. For me, for now, all roads lead to Le Fin. I always wanted my own little place, you know. I like the work. I like being among people, knowing their stories and their quirks, knowing just how and when to pull their legs about something, when to give them a pat on the shoulder, when to say nothing at all. I’m a diplomat, too. With everybody, it seems, but you.

#

Why is it that day is breaking outside and I still can’t manage a simple thank you?

#

The cursor blinks. There’s nothing else to say. I click to close the window. “Do you want to save your changes?”

I have to laugh. Now there’s a loaded question.

#

So you wander with a group of weirdoes now, do you? Stray cats you’ve taken in, no doubt, to look after and fret over and boss around. I hope they give you what you need. I hope they need what you have to give them.

But more than anything, I hope they don’t do as I did, the most deliberately cruel thing I ever did.

I hope they don’t give you a watch when they retire you.


End file.
